You and I are both avid students of the material. I didn't reach my opinion through ignorance.
If you have a particular Ward book that you think presents the best argument that we're all gonna die from global warming--or more carefully stated, that global warming is going to have catastrophic consequences (even Lovelock thinks that only 98% of us or so will be killed)--then I will read it.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
He might have been well-meaning at one time. But his communist setups--he cutely calls this "Capitalism 3.0"--have him massively invested in the scare; and he has proposed getting 20% of the income of every person on the planet so that he can spend it in ways that you and I are not smart enough to do.
Of course it's paying off--and BP has been pushing the green movement for a long time, which is how they were allowed to get the record that they have. BP pushed Kyoto, and is (so far as I know) the largest college donor in history to Berkeley to the tune of some $500 million. Tainted money? Berkeley has already decided that it's not too tainted to keep. You see, it's a lot of money.
If global warming is a serious problem, it would be an amazing coincidence--as it happens to have a cadre of massively crooked and evil people pushing it and positioned to benefit from the resulting government changes.
Global warming and pollution are two completely different issues in my mind. One of the most disappointing aspects of the current ecological craze is to conflate the two, then diffuse the efforts to deal with the real problems.
I mentioned his Out of Thin Air. It goes into great detail about the way in which the chemistry and other aspects of Earth's atmosphere has changed over the last 600 million years, the extinctions associated with its more radical, rapid changes, and the way life has adapted and evolved in response to its evolution. The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of our World, by Ward and Donald Brownlee, who is a professional astronomer, as the title says, how Earth's various systems -- hydrological and lithic as well as atmospheric will change in the future, and how life will be forced to adapt to those changes. Ward's Amazon.com: Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions discusses the mass extinctions that have occurred on our world since the Neoproterozoic Era, and their likely causes, including, in some cases, changes in the atmosphere that made for too much or too little oxygen or carbon dioxide for then-existing forms of life. Each book goes into great detail about its subject; each has a different emphasis and thus some different details and different foci than the others. Take your pick.
If you have a particular Ward book that you think presents the best argument that we're all gonna die from global warming--or more carefully stated, that global warming is going to have catastrophic consequences (even Lovelock thinks that only 98% of us or so will be killed)--then I will read it.
Ward may be alarmed, but he is not an alarmist. He's a highly intelligent and well-educated polymath; in addition to extensive training in geology, astrobiology, paleobiology, and related fields, he also has his own department at NASA (thought that may have changed, and damn Obama to hell) concerned with meteorology and atmospheric science. His books therefore cover a wide range of topics, and each one goes into great detail on its subject, drawing on an enormous database and wealth of field experience to be able to present highly complex subjects as comprehensively as possible. He uses these as textbooks in the classes he teaches, as well. And he is not happy at how stupid and ignorant so many of those students are, thanks to our modern "educational" system and media influence. Anyway, I linked reviews of three of his books because each has a different focus and I don't know which one you want to try first.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
Oh, hell, Gore's a drama queen, playing to an audience of highly ignorant people -- he misses being Vice President, and regrets not becoming President, and digs on the substitute attention. I have heard him described, quite accurately, as "even stupider than his daddy," who was a Senator himself. It's also an open secret that his family has been part of the "Tennessee Mafai" for several generations, and that they are also Communists -- which he himself is. One of their closest family friends was the late and unlamented Armand Hammer, head of the Arm&Hammer company (guess what that logo celebrates) while he was alive.
Hammer wasn't just a friend--he owned the Gores, essentially. Because of his permanently paid-for ticket, he was the only non-government person invited to various State events--a bit like Kenneth Lay and his 28 trips with Clinton trade junkets, a practice that ended abruptly when Bush took over.
I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
Hammer wasn't just a friend--he owned the Gores, essentially. Because of his permanently paid-for ticket, he was the only non-government person invited to various State events--a bit like Kenneth Lay and his 28 trips with Clinton trade junkets, a practice that ended abruptly when Bush took over.
I've heard that, and I'm not surprised. Compared to Obama, the Clintons are far-right; but by any other measure, they are of the Left, though Bill did move toward the center in some respects while he was in the White House. And Gore is a raving Marxist.
I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
though Bill did move toward the center in some respects while he was in the White House.
He was largely forced in this direction in 1994 and 1995 by the failing economy and the big Republican win. And while fighting the Republican economic changes, he was quick to take credit for them when they were successful.
But you're right in that Clinton was primarily a politician, trying to do what it takes to stay popular. Obama assumes the popularity will come (from his Left base, the people he needs) but he is focusing on horrific policy changes, popular or no.
Obama is a fanatic and a lunatic, and he is pushing an agenda that has little or no relationship to reality. He will continue pushing it until something forces him away from a position in which he can do so. He makes Caligula look like the soul of reason in comparison.
BP has been pushing the green movement for a long time, which is how they were allowed to get the record that they have. BP pushed Kyoto, and is (so far as I know) the largest college donor in history to Berkeley to the tune of some $500 million. Tainted money? Berkeley has already decided that it's not too tainted to keep. You see, it's a lot of money.
BP is one of the all-time most corrupt companies in the world. Among other things, they helped lobby for cap-and-trade, then positioned themselves far out in the Gulf of Mexico, in International Waters, in order to avoid cap-and-trade regulations. And I trust you've heard about their involvement in getting the Lockerbie bomber released (Obama was also involved). One more bunch to hate because they have so corrupted the discussion about global warming, pollution, and everything else that they might as well have been aiming to get everyone to think science itself, on any subject, is a hoax. Which one hell of a lot of people who ought to know better think now, and widely rant about. I'm a conservative, myself -- a South Park conservative. Not an airhead, like way too many people who call themselves conservatives are. Nor do I have any intention of leading the charge to burn scientists at the stake -- which too many people who call themselves scientists do. The only people I feel comfortable among are scientists; my failing health and other problems, however, kept me from having a career in the sciences, and it's rather lonely out here. But that's the way it goes. Anyway, while there are too many bandwagon enthusiasts about various subjects in the sciences, condemning them for being scientists and damning science itself because of it is the cultural equivalent of handing our species and maybe our world a Darwin Award, and I conclude that in 99.9+% of all cases, both those calling themselves liberals and those calling themselves conservatives are idiots.
I have been a science enthusiast all my life (I started to say "all my adult life," but it's far longer than that. When I was seven, I attempted to teach cellular biology to the neighborhood kids; it was called the Cell Club. But this didn't last all that long; they had competing interests.
I like science, and have great respect for it, which is why I am so annoyed to see scientists behaving badly. The ClimateGate business was not really surprising to me. I was one of the first to download those files, and the source code is worse than I could have guessed, but I had been involved enough that the bad behavior was much as I'd anticipated. Bolder, perhaps, like the "let's delete the emails! Don't let them see your data! We'll fudge the numbers!" that they actually committed to writing.
Not everything is contaminated by this mindset, but these are key individuals at crucial centers in the UK, the US and elsewhere, and they've pulled the pins out from under all their research. And destroyed evidence in a laughable attempt to protect themselves, made more bizarre by the fact that various panels in the US and UK have exonerated them to protect their funding.
None of it matters any more. The current president of the United States has destroyed everything that made this nation great, above all the space program. Europe has thrown away its future. No one has any initiative any more. There are real problems to be solved, but the Left only uses them as "issues" to try to push their agenda, and the Right pretends they don't exist, and neither group will ever do anything about them, no matter what. The generations to come will inherit a dying, worthless planet. Knowing that kind of makes it all seem absolutely pointless to me.
By convincing you that the planet is dying, they've done far worse than simply taking away your freedoms. They've undercut your will.
I sympathize with your health issues. I've lost an eye a few months ago, my other one is good for "five months to five years" (and it's been about nine months already) and I am losing the ability to walk. It takes me one to two hours each morning to be able to stand upright, and I am living with heating pads at the moment.
I'm endeavoring to make a living as a writer, but a major legal battle has done much damage.
Life has been interesting, it seems, for both of us.
By convincing you that the planet is dying, they've done far worse than simply taking away your freedoms. They've undercut your will.
If by "they" include my adoptive parents, two sets of foster parents, a whole lot of schoolyard bullies, a rapist gynecologist in juvenile hall, and a number of other bastards who have made my life absolute hell over the years, I agree with you. It would have been far kinder if they had just euthanized me as a baby. I will never, ever forgive them for not doing so. Right up until that son of a bitch in the White House killed the space program, I had some hope. Now I have none. It was as if it were a personal attack on me -- I'm not saying it was meant personally, but it was the sort of thing my adoptive and foster parents would have done just to hurt me if they could have. That was my last reason to go on -- and now it doesn't exist any more, and there is nothing for me. As I said, it started when I was born -- or, actually, when I was conceived. My biological mother spent all 9 months of her pregnancy hating at me. She may have been paid to bear me (this was in 1945, and my adoption was gray-market, not black-market, but today it wouldn't have been legal). I was adopted by monsters, and it never got any better. The only person in all the world who might have been my ally, who might have loved me, was my twin brother, whom they murdered right in front of my eyes when I was 6 months old. Now this. My adoptive parents voted Republican, but they were total control-freaks, and yes, they'd have murdered the space program if they could have. Why not murder the planet while they're at it, you know?
I sympathize with your health issues. I've lost an eye a few months ago, my other one is good for "five months to five years" (and it's been about nine months already) and I am losing the ability to walk. It takes me one to two hours each morning to be able to stand upright, and I am living with heating pads at the moment.
I'm endeavoring to make a living as a writer, but a major legal battle has done much damage.
Life has been interesting, it seems, for both of us.
If I didn't feel my whole life has been utterly pointless, I'd be more sanguine about things. But now I am just waiting to die, too cowardly to take my own life, too boxed in all my life to ever be able to get a life.
I am sorry indeed to hear of your situation, and wish you only the best.
I, too, am a space enthusiast; I don't know if it will be any encouragement or not, but aspects of Obama's attempts to re-engineer NASA along with everything else are actually working out in favor of the private space industry.
I suspect that if Obama had realized that he was benefiting private industry, he'd have done something different just for spite. But here, he's accidentally done something useful. Many conservatives have been disturbed by the NASA plans (and I'm irritated at Congressional space cuts just in the past few days) but it isn't all bad.
It may actually be good.
Do you still live in the West Coast area? Santa Barbara is a half-hour's drive from where I sit, and I've got a NASA engineer coming out for a visit in a few weeks.
If global warming is a serious problem, it would be an amazing coincidence--as it happens to have a cadre of massively crooked and evil people pushing it and positioned to benefit from the resulting government changes.
It already is starting to have serious consequences. For example, there's a tropical fungus that is potentially lethal to us that has recently turned up in Canada and now is invading the US: Lethal fungus strain moving from Canada to US. That's a real fungus and real, emerging health problem, and the damned thing wouldn't have turned up in Canada if Canada weren't becoming warm enough for the fungus to survive winters there. As the Earth warms, the first creatures to move to higher latitudes from lower ones by any means possible are the tiny things that can give so much trouble: insects, parasites, bacteria, and viruses. And today, there are so very many ways for them to get there that didn't exist before the middle of the 19th century: railroads, airlines, automobiles, motorcycles, etc. Brendan demanded to know why, if global warming is real, cattle ranchers in the US aren't scrambling to move their herds north? For one thing, financially, that's prohibitively expensive in most cases. For another, new disease pathogens that can affect cattle are turning up at higher and higher latitudes.
There are other problems, as well. One of them is human: the Left has hijacked the issue for their own purposes, and their shenanigans have left anyone with a brain unwilling to even look at the issue because of extreme reluctance to play into the hands of Marxists, which is very understandable. The Left is part of the problem, not the solution. Remember how the Soviet Union collapsed, with food rotting on the docks because of corrupt officials? That's what the Left want to do with global warming: nothing effective -- just things that destroy civilization and doom just about everyone on Earth, because that, the almighty Dialectic will win (nobody left to oppose it). The Left are terminally brain-dead. And should be held accountable for every evil on Earth, whether they're responsible for it or not -- after all, they sold their souls to Evil, and should pay the consequences.
That's a real fungus and real, emerging health problem, and the damned thing wouldn't have turned up in Canada if Canada weren't becoming warm enough for the fungus to survive winters there.
What did this fungus do when Canada was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s? So much of this is badly distorted, and anything at all that happens is due to Global Warming, no matter how thin the link between coincidence and causality.
But making a larger surface area of the Earth more productive isn't all that bad, is it? We seem to be returning to that state from a century ago, although it's not likely to last. At least, with the CO2 increase, plants are growing much better--and that feeds all of us, temperature change or no.
If you have a particular Ward book that you think presents the best argument that we're all gonna die from global warming--or more carefully stated, that global warming is going to have catastrophic consequences (even Lovelock thinks that only 98% of us or so will be killed)--then I will read it.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
He might have been well-meaning at one time. But his communist setups--he cutely calls this "Capitalism 3.0"--have him massively invested in the scare; and he has proposed getting 20% of the income of every person on the planet so that he can spend it in ways that you and I are not smart enough to do.
Of course it's paying off--and BP has been pushing the green movement for a long time, which is how they were allowed to get the record that they have. BP pushed Kyoto, and is (so far as I know) the largest college donor in history to Berkeley to the tune of some $500 million. Tainted money? Berkeley has already decided that it's not too tainted to keep. You see, it's a lot of money.
If global warming is a serious problem, it would be an amazing coincidence--as it happens to have a cadre of massively crooked and evil people pushing it and positioned to benefit from the resulting government changes.
Global warming and pollution are two completely different issues in my mind. One of the most disappointing aspects of the current ecological craze is to conflate the two, then diffuse the efforts to deal with the real problems.
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Ward may be alarmed, but he is not an alarmist. He's a highly intelligent and well-educated polymath; in addition to extensive training in geology, astrobiology, paleobiology, and related fields, he also has his own department at NASA (thought that may have changed, and damn Obama to hell) concerned with meteorology and atmospheric science. His books therefore cover a wide range of topics, and each one goes into great detail on its subject, drawing on an enormous database and wealth of field experience to be able to present highly complex subjects as comprehensively as possible. He uses these as textbooks in the classes he teaches, as well. And he is not happy at how stupid and ignorant so many of those students are, thanks to our modern "educational" system and media influence. Anyway, I linked reviews of three of his books because each has a different focus and I don't know which one you want to try first.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
Oh, hell, Gore's a drama queen, playing to an audience of highly ignorant people -- he misses being Vice President, and regrets not becoming President, and digs on the substitute attention. I have heard him described, quite accurately, as "even stupider than his daddy," who was a Senator himself. It's also an open secret that his family has been part of the "Tennessee Mafai" for several generations, and that they are also Communists -- which he himself is. One of their closest family friends was the late and unlamented Armand Hammer, head of the Arm&Hammer company (guess what that logo celebrates) while he was alive.
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I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
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I've heard that, and I'm not surprised. Compared to Obama, the Clintons are far-right; but by any other measure, they are of the Left, though Bill did move toward the center in some respects while he was in the White House. And Gore is a raving Marxist.
I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
His mother named him that, and that's why.
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He was largely forced in this direction in 1994 and 1995 by the failing economy and the big Republican win. And while fighting the Republican economic changes, he was quick to take credit for them when they were successful.
But you're right in that Clinton was primarily a politician, trying to do what it takes to stay popular. Obama assumes the popularity will come (from his Left base, the people he needs) but he is focusing on horrific policy changes, popular or no.
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BP is one of the all-time most corrupt companies in the world. Among other things, they helped lobby for cap-and-trade, then positioned themselves far out in the Gulf of Mexico, in International Waters, in order to avoid cap-and-trade regulations. And I trust you've heard about their involvement in getting the Lockerbie bomber released (Obama was also involved). One more bunch to hate because they have so corrupted the discussion about global warming, pollution, and everything else that they might as well have been aiming to get everyone to think science itself, on any subject, is a hoax. Which one hell of a lot of people who ought to know better think now, and widely rant about. I'm a conservative, myself -- a South Park conservative. Not an airhead, like way too many people who call themselves conservatives are. Nor do I have any intention of leading the charge to burn scientists at the stake -- which too many people who call themselves scientists do. The only people I feel comfortable among are scientists; my failing health and other problems, however, kept me from having a career in the sciences, and it's rather lonely out here. But that's the way it goes. Anyway, while there are too many bandwagon enthusiasts about various subjects in the sciences, condemning them for being scientists and damning science itself because of it is the cultural equivalent of handing our species and maybe our world a Darwin Award, and I conclude that in 99.9+% of all cases, both those calling themselves liberals and those calling themselves conservatives are idiots.
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I like science, and have great respect for it, which is why I am so annoyed to see scientists behaving badly. The ClimateGate business was not really surprising to me. I was one of the first to download those files, and the source code is worse than I could have guessed, but I had been involved enough that the bad behavior was much as I'd anticipated. Bolder, perhaps, like the "let's delete the emails! Don't let them see your data! We'll fudge the numbers!" that they actually committed to writing.
Not everything is contaminated by this mindset, but these are key individuals at crucial centers in the UK, the US and elsewhere, and they've pulled the pins out from under all their research. And destroyed evidence in a laughable attempt to protect themselves, made more bizarre by the fact that various panels in the US and UK have exonerated them to protect their funding.
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I sympathize with your health issues. I've lost an eye a few months ago, my other one is good for "five months to five years" (and it's been about nine months already) and I am losing the ability to walk. It takes me one to two hours each morning to be able to stand upright, and I am living with heating pads at the moment.
I'm endeavoring to make a living as a writer, but a major legal battle has done much damage.
Life has been interesting, it seems, for both of us.
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If by "they" include my adoptive parents, two sets of foster parents, a whole lot of schoolyard bullies, a rapist gynecologist in juvenile hall, and a number of other bastards who have made my life absolute hell over the years, I agree with you. It would have been far kinder if they had just euthanized me as a baby. I will never, ever forgive them for not doing so. Right up until that son of a bitch in the White House killed the space program, I had some hope. Now I have none. It was as if it were a personal attack on me -- I'm not saying it was meant personally, but it was the sort of thing my adoptive and foster parents would have done just to hurt me if they could have. That was my last reason to go on -- and now it doesn't exist any more, and there is nothing for me. As I said, it started when I was born -- or, actually, when I was conceived. My biological mother spent all 9 months of her pregnancy hating at me. She may have been paid to bear me (this was in 1945, and my adoption was gray-market, not black-market, but today it wouldn't have been legal). I was adopted by monsters, and it never got any better. The only person in all the world who might have been my ally, who might have loved me, was my twin brother, whom they murdered right in front of my eyes when I was 6 months old. Now this. My adoptive parents voted Republican, but they were total control-freaks, and yes, they'd have murdered the space program if they could have. Why not murder the planet while they're at it, you know?
I sympathize with your health issues. I've lost an eye a few months ago, my other one is good for "five months to five years" (and it's been about nine months already) and I am losing the ability to walk. It takes me one to two hours each morning to be able to stand upright, and I am living with heating pads at the moment.
I'm endeavoring to make a living as a writer, but a major legal battle has done much damage.
Life has been interesting, it seems, for both of us.
If I didn't feel my whole life has been utterly pointless, I'd be more sanguine about things. But now I am just waiting to die, too cowardly to take my own life, too boxed in all my life to ever be able to get a life.
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I, too, am a space enthusiast; I don't know if it will be any encouragement or not, but aspects of Obama's attempts to re-engineer NASA along with everything else are actually working out in favor of the private space industry.
I suspect that if Obama had realized that he was benefiting private industry, he'd have done something different just for spite. But here, he's accidentally done something useful. Many conservatives have been disturbed by the NASA plans (and I'm irritated at Congressional space cuts just in the past few days) but it isn't all bad.
It may actually be good.
Do you still live in the West Coast area? Santa Barbara is a half-hour's drive from where I sit, and I've got a NASA engineer coming out for a visit in a few weeks.
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It already is starting to have serious consequences. For example, there's a tropical fungus that is potentially lethal to us that has recently turned up in Canada and now is invading the US: Lethal fungus strain moving from Canada to US. That's a real fungus and real, emerging health problem, and the damned thing wouldn't have turned up in Canada if Canada weren't becoming warm enough for the fungus to survive winters there. As the Earth warms, the first creatures to move to higher latitudes from lower ones by any means possible are the tiny things that can give so much trouble: insects, parasites, bacteria, and viruses. And today, there are so very many ways for them to get there that didn't exist before the middle of the 19th century: railroads, airlines, automobiles, motorcycles, etc. Brendan demanded to know why, if global warming is real, cattle ranchers in the US aren't scrambling to move their herds north? For one thing, financially, that's prohibitively expensive in most cases. For another, new disease pathogens that can affect cattle are turning up at higher and higher latitudes.
There are other problems, as well. One of them is human: the Left has hijacked the issue for their own purposes, and their shenanigans have left anyone with a brain unwilling to even look at the issue because of extreme reluctance to play into the hands of Marxists, which is very understandable. The Left is part of the problem, not the solution. Remember how the Soviet Union collapsed, with food rotting on the docks because of corrupt officials? That's what the Left want to do with global warming: nothing effective -- just things that destroy civilization and doom just about everyone on Earth, because that, the almighty Dialectic will win (nobody left to oppose it). The Left are terminally brain-dead. And should be held accountable for every evil on Earth, whether they're responsible for it or not -- after all, they sold their souls to Evil, and should pay the consequences.
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What did this fungus do when Canada was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s? So much of this is badly distorted, and anything at all that happens is due to Global Warming, no matter how thin the link between coincidence and causality.
But making a larger surface area of the Earth more productive isn't all that bad, is it? We seem to be returning to that state from a century ago, although it's not likely to last. At least, with the CO2 increase, plants are growing much better--and that feeds all of us, temperature change or no.
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